Benjamin Roy Mottelson

2026-01-21 09:31:12

Benjamin Roy Mottelson (Chicago, USA, July 9, 1926 – May 13, 2022, Copenhagen, Denmark) was an American-Danish theoretical physicist, specialist in the field of nuclear physics, laureate of the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Oge Bohr and Leo James Rainwater "for the discovery of the relationship between the collective motion and the motion of an individual particle in the atomic nucleus and the development theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this relationship" (1975). Together with Bohr and David Pines (1958) applied the Bardin-Cooper-Shriffer theory of superconductivity to the description of the structure of the nucleus, which made it possible to explain the difference in stability between nuclei with an even and odd number of nucleons. Together with Bohr, they published the monumental two-volume monograph "The Structure of the Atomic Nucleus". Actively engaged in the study of Bose-Einstein condensates, which he considered a good object for studying the properties of many-body quantum systems and even called them "artificial nuclei", published a pioneering study of growth spectra of rotating condensates (1999). In recent years, he was deeply interested in the foundations of quantum mechanics.